In November 1941, a newspaper in Nazi-occupied Belgium printed a long list of names under the headline “The Jews of Liege.” It came with a hideous caricature and a text accusing Jews of responsibility for the war (it is in the online archive of the Yad Vashem memorial in Israel).
Nearly half of the Jews living in Belgium — more than 25,000 — were eventually deported to Auschwitz and other death camps. Fewer than 2,000 survived, according to the U.S. Holocaust Museum.
The list, from a newspaper ironically named The Friend of the People, has come to light in the U.S. because of the Trump administration’s attempts to force the University of Pennsylvania — and presumably other schools — to identify Jewish employees and students.
The administration, through the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), sued Penn in connection with an inquiry into purported antisemitism there. In a motion in federal court, Penn rightly calls it an “extraordinary and unconstitutional demand.”
The government, it said, was “entirely disregarding the frightening and well-documented history of governmental agencies that undertook efforts to identify and assemble information regarding persons of Jewish ancestry.”
Stoking antisemitism
Well said. It’s never a good thing for a government to categorize any of its citizens by religion, which is why the Census Bureau doesn’t ask.
Given history, Jews are particularly vulnerable.
With antisemitism on the rise everywhere, it has not spared the nation’s college campuses, where legitimate protests against Israel’s conduct in Gaza and the West Bank have at times crossed the line into overt antisemitism and harassment of Jewish students.
But as the university told the EEOC, it had notified Jews on campus of the agency’s interest so they can file their own complaints if they wish. That did not satisfy the EEOC.
This dispute should not be seen in isolation. It is all too obvious that President Trump’s larger motive is to control, dominate and neutralize every American institution that might oppose his agenda and, in particular, the Republican Party’s campaigns to bleach American history of any racist roots and legacy.
America’s universities, by their nature, are natural opponents to that regression.
A front for culture wars
The New York Times reported that Trump had barely returned to power last year when civil rights lawyers at the Justice Department were ordered to look into at least 75 universities for actionable offenses. It appeared to them to be a front for the GOP’s culture wars and for Trump’s derision of what he calls “woke” ideology. At least 17 of the lawyers soon resigned.
“We were only told to investigate cases that were in blue states,” one lawyer told the Times.
Trump has tried to extract billions of dollars from universities and has succeeded in squeezing more than $400 million from four of them — Brown, Columbia, Cornell and Northwestern — for purposes of his choosing.
One prospect is as ominous as that of a government capturing its universities for political purposes — a government encouraging antisemitism under the guise of opposing it. That is the inherent danger in compiling Jewish lists.
Hitting close to home
It’s no secret: America’s antisemitic underground, personified most publicly by white supremacist Nick Fuentes, seeks a firmer foothold in the Republican Party. In Florida, Fuentes and the toxic commentator Tucker Carlson are making nice over James Fishback, an unaccomplished far-right GOP candidate for governor.
One of Fishback’s principal issues — government divestiture of Israeli bonds — is a dog-whistle to antisemites.
But friends of Israel and of American Jews do neither any good by promoting such bad legislation as House and Senate bills in Florida forbidding the use of the term “West Bank” in schoolbooks and government documents and requiring the occupied territory to be known as “Judea and Samaria.”
The world knows the West Bank as that, not by ancient Biblical names that are part of Israel’s graceless attempt to whitewash its illegal creeping annexation of a territory where some 3 million Palestinians live.
Florida law should not be conformed to Israel’s whims on that matter. But HB 31 has already won a 16-1 vote in the House Government Operations Subcommittee.
Both HB 31 and its Senate companion, SB 1106, seriously misstate history. The Senate version claims Israel “annexed” the lands from Jordan during the 1967 six-day war, and HB 31 uses the word “liberated.”
Neither is true. Such propaganda is educational as well as political malpractice.
And it gives antisemites another arrow in their poisoned quiver. However well-intentioned the sponsors may believe, these bills are as bad as the government compiling lists of Jews.
The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/2026/01/26/why-is-trump-compiling-lists-of-jews-editorial/
